writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
In December I posted the first Playing for Change video of musicians around the world playing/singing “Stand By Me.” Take a look if you haven’t seen it. It’s a wonderful video: so powerful to see the song come together from around the world, people applying their individual skills to a common idea.
Here’s another.
Whatever else we may be, we’re all human; and I love the ways we find to connect with each other.
Today is all about growly-voiced boys. There’s no particular lyrical deep-inner-meaning to the songs — no, I’m not planning to wander out with a gun and I don’t think that All Is Lost. Quite the contrary, in fact. These days I feel as though much is being found.
If you’ve seen The Sopranos then you’ve heard a heavily edited version of “Woke Up This Morning.” This original version is better: I enjoy the story-ness of it, and I really like the spoken word section towards the end:
When you woke up this morning everything was gone
By half past ten your head was going ding dong
Ringing like a bell from your head down to your toes
Like some voice trying to tell you there’s something you should know
Last night you were flying but today you’re so low
Ain’t it times like these makes you wonder if you’ll ever know
The meaning of things as they appear to the others
Wives husbands mothers fathers sisters and brothers
Don’t you wish you didn’t function, don’t you wish you didn’t think
Beyond the next paycheck and the next little drink
Well you do. So make up your mind to go on
‘Cause when you woke up this morning, everything you had was gone.
I think it would be awesome to see someone good do that with total commitment at Rockaroke (oh my, Rockaroke: a story for another post…).
“Corrosion” is a song I sometimes listen to obsessively when I’m writing. I have no explanation for this beyond the sheer drive of it. But I know the song wouldn’t work if he were one of those flute-toned tenors, you know?
I discovered Robbie Robertson’s solo work on the radio one afternoon back in the 80’s, when I was driving somewhere in the furnace known as Atlanta, miserable in the heat, and suddenly thought I was hearing a new U2 song — the guitar is unmistakable. But the voice wasn’t Bono (although he’s there too, an added bonus). I fell in love with this song, and in fact the whole album — if you know it and have also read Dangerous Space, you may recognize the origin of the title (although not the content) of “Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road.” Robbie Robertson’s music kept me going through some hard times alone in the late 80’s before Nicola moved to the US, and I will always have a soft spot for his gravelly voice.
And no growly-boy roster would be complete without Seattle’s own Eddie Vedder, a great musician and, by all accounts, a genuinely nice guy who patronizes his local coffeeshop and turns up at other people’s shows. That’s a very Seattle way to be an artist. I love this town.
Enjoy your Saturday. I hope the sun is bright, but not hard, wherever you are.
Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!
This essay is published today at @U2, the (yep, she’s going to say it again) best damn U2 fan website on the planet. The essay is part of our “Like a Song” series, in which @U2 staffers reflect on the personal meaning that specific songs have for us. It’s one of our most popular regular features. If you enjoy this one, I invite you to also read “Like a Song: Surrender” and “Like a Song: Elevation”, as well as the many other great essays from members of the @U2 writing team.
I’m posting the essay here in its entirety because I want to include the song itself, for those who don’t know it, as well as the lyrics (since the song moves rather fast). You’ll find both after the essay.
I really do love this song. I find it structurally fascinating. I love Bono’s voice, the urgency and precision of the rhythm section, the guitar… wow, listen to the guitar become positively ecstatic at about 3:40 as Bono proclaims We are people born of sound. I believe it. I cannot wait to see this song live.
Enjoy.
Like a Song: Breathe
It’s been hard to breathe.
As is true for many people, much of my life is suddenly at risk: my income, my mortgage, my career, my art, the life I love so much and have worked so hard to build. In what seemed like only a moment, only a breath, the world’s markets went down in flames and took my money with them: the business I started has not yet found its feet, and may never become sustainable in this shaky economy; and the writing project that has consumed me for three years was given to someone else.
Most of us have taken a punch in the gut sometime in our lives. Most of us know what it’s like when we suddenly can’t breathe.
Man at the door says if I want to stay alive a bit longer
There’s three things I need you to know.
I knew what those things were: squeeze down our budget, get a real job, and don’t whine. Millions of people are having a hard time. So I sent out a truckload of resumes and tailored cover letters. I had a hundred “coffee meetings” to network with strangers, both of us smiling hard and hoping desperately each other would have the answer. I went to one unbelievably surreal job fair where the tightly packed room smelled so strongly of fear — like something burning — that I had to leave.
The forest fire that is fear
All those hours at my desk, working on those letters and resumes, I listened constantly to No Line on the Horizon. It was clear to me right away that this album is Bono’s line in the sand: he is a musician first and a world-saver second. Maybe I heard it that way because I was missing my screenplay badly, and trying to come to terms with the idea of someone else doing the writing that I thought of as mine. This is standard practice in Hollywood, it happens to every writer, but it was the first time it had happened to me. I wanted to start another project, to keep working, to stay sane. But I’m not Bono; art doesn’t pay my mortgage right now, and so I told myself that art was not the priority.
But I went on listening to Bono throwing down, being so clear: Sing your heart out.
And then I had the chance to apply for a job that would involve working around writers. A tough job for not enough pay, but maybe I could still do some writing of my own, or at least be near people who were. I fought like a bear for it. So did the more than 100 other people who applied. And sometimes there are miracles, but not this time. I was their number three pick; they talked about bringing all three of us in to interview with the entire staff, but the staff fell stone in love with number one, and that was it.
And there I was, no job, no screenplay, and I couldn’t breathe. All I could do was run in mental circles inside my own head, like a frightened animal in a forest fire.
The forest fire that is fear
And then… I don’t know. Maybe I ran myself out and was finally exhausted enough that the only thing I could do was turn and face my fears. Really look at them. Losing my home, my security, my writing, my confidence, failing, being ashamed, wrecking my partner’s life.
Here is what I saw. I saw that breath is life. Oxygen keeps our hearts beating and gives our muscles strength, and feeds our brains so we can think. And fear is like fire: it takes the air away. It burns our hope and our will and leaves us only the ashes of grief that will choke us if we let them. No wonder I was feeling helpless and afraid: I had stopped breathing.
And I’m not the only one. Millions of us every day are frightened and grieving. Right this second, someone is losing their job, their home, their relationship. Their child is sick. Their beloved cat is dying in their arms. They are blinking at the “Closed” sign on their favorite coffee shop where the barista always knew exactly how they liked their latte.
And right this second, someone is finding their courage to start again. Right now, someone is trying to breathe.
So here it is: writing is my breath. It may not pay my mortgage, but it will save me so that I can save myself. Writing this will save me. I got my screenplay back, and in a 78-hour period last week I spent 42 hours working on it, and that will save me. I am going to start offering my services as an editor and looking for more freelance gigs, and even if I can’t get enough work, even if I end up again as some company’s director of whatever, what I am doing right now will save me. Because I feel like myself again. I can breathe.
So this song has become for me the roar on the other side of that horrible silence. Every day I will walk out into the street and sing my heart out for as long as I can.
We all have someone or something we love so much that it defines us. We all have things that make us who we are. When you’re frightened, when it feels too hard, that’s when you need your clear brain and your strength the most – so run, run to the things that make you breathe. Whether you find them in art, family, religion, helping others, reading books, gardening, hiking, counting stars, no matter — stand in the space of those things and breathe the pure oxygen they give you. Breathe deep. I promise it will help.
Walk out into a sunburst street
Sing your heart out
Sing my heart out.
I’ve found grace inside a sound
I found grace, it’s all that I found.
And I can breathe.
“Breathe” – U2
16th of June, nine-oh-five, doorbell rings
Man at the door says if I want to stay alive a bit longer
There’s three things I need you to know
Three.
Coming from a long line of traveling sales people on my mother’s side
I wasn’t gonna buy just anyone’s cockatoo
So why would I invite a complete stranger into my home?
Would you?
These days are better than that
These days are better than that
Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn
Every day I have to find the courage
To walk out into the street
With arms out
Got a love you can’t defeat
Neither down nor out
There’s nothing you have that I need
I can breathe
Breathe now
16th of June, Chinese stocks are going up
And I’m coming down with some new Asian virus
Juju man, juju man
Doc says you’re fine, or dying
Please
Nine-oh-nine, St. John Divine on the line, my pulse is fine
But I’m running down the road like loose electricity
While the band in my head plays a striptease.
The roar that lies on the other side of silence
The forest fire that is fear so deny it.
Walk out into the street
Sing your heart out
The people we meet will not be drowned out
There’s nothing you have that I need
I can breathe
Breathe now
We are people born of sound
The songs are in our eyes
Gonna wear them like a crown
Walk out into a sunburst street
Sing your heart out
Sing my heart out
I’ve found grace inside a sound
I found grace, it’s all that I found
And I can breathe
Breathe now.
I am the seven millionth person to blog about Susan Boyle, which makes me a little late to the party, but just in case you haven’t seen this clip — I promise, your time will not be wasted.
Susan Boyle auditioned recently for the reality show “Britain’s Got Talent.” This is what happened.
click here if you can’t see the player
The reason we tell this kind of story over and over in books and movies is because sometimes life has these storybook moments. And because people have dreams that are private and powerful; and sometimes we find our courage and seize the moment when it comes, even when it means walking out on stage to jeers and catcalls. It’s one of the bravest things I’ve seen in a long time. And one of the clearest examples that talent isn’t enough for these stories we love so much: there must also be guts.
Sometimes being brave only gets us through the next week or day or minute. But sometimes it gets us right to the heart of the dream. And sometimes we have to go through years of being brave over and over, protecting the dream, until we get the chance to show our guts. If Susan Boyle can be so brave, then I guess I can too.
I have a new blogtoy — this lovely mp3 player from Tracy Fu that will let me put playlists in posts. Hah. Brace yourselves — I think there’s music in our future. Since Friday Pint is done, perhaps there needs to be a music day. Stay tuned to this station…
Today’s playlist is “All About Girls,” and it’s about… well, you know. Perfect music for a spring Saturday, to my mind. If I have to do taxes all day, at least there’s music.
Enjoy your Saturday.
Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!
Several staff writers for @U2 (still the biggest and best U2 fan website on the planet) recently reviewed the new album, No Line on the Horizon.
Love, love, love.
I’ll be writing my next “Like A Song” essay about “Breathe” in mid-May. But for now, here’s my review; I invite you to read the other staff responses, and give the album a listen. Chances are I’m listening to it too.
Enjoy.
It’s a brilliant album.
I am a U2 fan, but I’m not an automatic fan of all things U2. I haven’t listened to a single track from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb since the Vertigo tour. I am lukewarm about All That You Can’t Leave Behind — I love some of the songs there, but as an album it feels uneven to me, disconnected from itself and certainly disconnected from me. And so I’ve been worried.
And here I am, back again in the church of U2, mad in love with No Line On The Horizon.
It reminds me structurally of War — an album in two parts that takes me on a single, spiraling journey to a place that I can only describe as “deep inside.” Deep inside U2, who are in my opinion truly stretching themselves musically for the first time since Pop, and finally — finally! — back to making deeply personal music that is also sometimes political, as opposed to tub-thumping numbers or the horror that is “Window in the Skies.” And deep inside myself, too; these are songs I can connect with, soar with, cry to, move to. Songs I can love.
The base of the music is what I love best about U2: the strength and grace of the bass and drums, the guitar like soul in flight, the voice that is someone’s heart turned into sound. And from this base, the album climbs into places like “Breathe” and “Cedars of Lebanon” that literally take my breath away. I’ve never been so astonished by the ending of an album before.
It’s good to be in love again. It’s brilliant.
It’s not surprising to find me reflecting on writing the day after the Nebula news. So many stories of writing! Nicola has told the story of the first Nebula (when we were both nominated the same year) when we stopped in the middle of working on our new house and went out to a restaurant with paint in our hair. And last night we drank a bottle of pinot gris in front of the fire and then ate leftover spaghetti, partly because we can’t really afford to go out right now and partly because, well, there are lots of ways to celebrate. After more than 20 years together, we’re good at making just about anything feel special if we want to.
That skill to turn a moment to our own purpose — to alter the emotional dynamic (or to cement it), to step into a new perspective, to feel fully and then move on, to find the next thing to say that will turn us down a different road — that’s a writing skill as well as a life skill. I can’t imagine either life or work without it.
I wrote my first serious story — the first that I conceived and started and finished though I knew it wasn’t very good, because it was the finishing that mattered — at age 20 or so. I had returned to Florida after four wonderful years at boarding school and one disastrous year at Northwestern University. I was living with my mother; she worked two jobs (one full-time), I worked two or three part-time jobs and carried a full course load at the University of South Florida to keep the grants I’d earned. I was in the theatre program, so I spent many nights rehearsing for classes or shows, performing, building sets, tearing them down…
We were always tired. And sometimes, in the middle of washing the dishes that had piled up over days because I just couldn’t face the kitchen (it was an old house, it was Florida, there were bugs, it was just no fun), I would find myself feeling the particular hopelessness of youth, the angst of I want things to be better but I don’t know how, I don’t have the money, and it all takes so long… That’s where my first real story came from, and it was appropriately, y’know, angsty, about a lonely dying woman who smuggles herself onto a rocket so that when it re-enters the atmosphere and burns, she will be the streak of light that people see overhead.
Sometimes I still get angsty about writing, about life. But I have better strategies now. I know how to change those moments, how to feel and move on, how to turn down a different road. I no longer must eradicate the tiny biting voices that sometimes speak from under my breastbone. They’re like the bugs in Florida, resilient and good at hiding in the cracks, and you just can’t win at their game. The trick with bugs and voices is to just smile and say, Oh, you again, yeah, yeah, hello, go away now.
When I was washing those millions of dishes all those years ago, I often listened to music on my headphones. Standing over the dirty water, I would play a movie in my head: the sink was a set, behind me were the cameras and the director, and we were all telling a story about a woman on a secret journey of struggle; but she was determined, and she would triumph, and everyone in the audience would be glad.
It was only later that I came to see that what I really wanted was my own secret journey, whose wanderings (occasionally off the map) would be fully mine, not just a “story” to please other people. And that’s what led me to Clarion, and Nicola, and Solitaire, and screenwriting, and “Dangerous Space,” and this lovely third-time “movie moment” of a Nebula nomination that I can celebrate any damn way I please. Because it’s not some character who’s feeling good. It’s me.
Recently, NPR used the music of Zoe Keating in a program without credit or attribution. Many people have posted about this, and the story exploded on the internet when writer and actor Wil Wheaton blogged about it and lit a fire under his bazillions of readers (including me) to spread the story.
I’m amazed to find on the NPR website, as of about two minutes ago, absolutely nothing in response to the towering stack of email (oooh, spot the paper-metaphor-using old person) they must have received by now.
The cool thing is that Keating is probably getting way more exposure from angry webizens than she might have got from a properly-given attribution. And she deserves it: she’s pretty amazing. See and hear for yourself, and then please go read Wil Wheaton’s post — it includes a description of how Keating makes this marvelous music, and quotes her (honest and dignified) response to the situation.
Gorgeous music. I’m sorry she hasn’t yet received the credit she deserves from NPR, but I’m very grateful to the InterWeb for bringing her to my attention. How lovely to find such beauty in this pixellated world.
[Edited to add later today: Here’s an update from Wil Wheaton (via Karina). “One final update: A few people from NPR left comments here or on Twitter, and it appears that this was, in fact, a mistake. Reader JV sent me an e-mail just a moment ago with a link to NPR’s website, where they’ve credited Zoe for her music. I’ve always thought NPR were the good guys, and I’m glad that people there made an effort to make things right.”]
Back in the late 80’s I had a job as talent co-host on a syndicated radio program called “Sunday Side Up” — a Sunday-morning light jazz/fusion program. The job was a miserable soul-sucking experience, but I liked radio and although jazz wasn’t really my thing, I found some music to enjoy (Real Jazz People are fleeing the blog in droves at this moment, but what can I say? Mileage varies…)
I’ve been listening to Acoustic Alchemy for more than 20 years now because of that show. The song below, “Mr. Chow,” has always reminded me of my time in the Grand Canyon. I can’t explain why, except that the music sounds like sun and dust and rock and water to me. It sounds happy to be all by itself, as if it didn’t need people listening to it at all… and that’s how I’ve always remembered the canyon. Not as stately, not as “grand,” but as a place of light and stillness and the motion of water.
I applied to Clarion in late 1987 because I was dreaming of escape, and when Clarion accepted me I quit that awful job without a quiver or a qualm, even though I had no backup plan. I took Acoustic Alchemy with me to Michigan. And there I met Nicola, and phht, everything changed. The day before Nicola moved to the US, I drove to a lookout over a lake and played this album on the car stereo while I tried to imagine what it would be like to live with someone, to take that leap. It turns out that for the most part, it’s been just like the song. Happy, forward-moving, a little more complicated than it seems at first. Light and water.
Enjoy your day.
When I was writing “Dangerous Space,” I listened to songs I thought Mars and the band would like, and — especially — songs that Duncan Black might write and sing.
Here’s one: Audioslave, “I Am the Highway.”
It’s a song about relationship: for me, it’s the relationship between who I am in the everyday world, and who I am when I write.
I love my days and nights. They are sometimes tedious, sometimes very hard, often joyful. Nicola is here. People read my stories, and sometimes the stories come to life inside them. A bad day in my life is a bad day, but it’s my life and I love living it.
But here I am limited. Here sometimes I am so much less than I am. I don’t think I’m unusual that way, but that doesn’t really help (grin). I don’t like being less brave, less clear, less ready to throw my head back or throw my arms around someone, less generous, less passionately engaged… I love Nicola and my family and friends, I love this beautiful world so much, but I am not always happy about being tied to reality.
When I write, I am everything. And for those moments it is real, even if I cannot bring it with me into the real world.
I am not your rolling wheels
I am the highway
I am not your carpet ride
I am the sky
I am not your blowing wind
I am the lightning
I am not your autumn moon
I am the night
I love being everything.